European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Murphy of Torfaen Excerpts

Wednesday 14th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Suttie (LD)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to listen to the wisdom and experience of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames. He helps put all this back into perspective for us. I shall speak to Amendments 215, 198 and 187A, to which I have added my name. All three tackle the issue of avoiding a hard border and of upholding the progress made in the last 20 years since the Good Friday Belfast agreement.

Whereas there is virtually universal consensus about those aims, as the debate this evening has shown, there is still scarily little consensus about how they can be achieved in reality, especially given the timescale we are now talking about. Various options are being floated for the Irish border issue, but every one of them is considered utterly unacceptable to at least one section of society on the island of Ireland. This has all been further complicated by the confidence and supply arrangement that the Government have found themselves in since last summer, and the hard-line position on Brexit taken by the DUP.

In the absence of a credible policy from the Government and the current policy vacuum, various myths and assumptions have started to take hold. The first and most popular myth is, as my noble friend Lady Doocey has so clearly spelled out, that this problem can somehow magically be solved through “technological solutions”. The proponents of this myth have somewhat ironically given enormous credence to a paper written by one researcher for the Constitutional Affairs Committee in the European Parliament. As my noble friend said, and as the disclaimer in the document makes clear, that paper has no official status. People have perhaps been so keen to promote it because it is more than the Government themselves have been able to produce.

But even if such technological solutions were indeed feasible, as the noble Lord, Lord Browne, said, it is highly unlikely that they could be fully implemented within the next decade, never mind by next March. We just need to look at the track record across Whitehall to know how long it takes to introduce new technological systems, and how often there are severe technical and teething problems. On giving evidence to our EU Committee, a senior Swiss customs official acknowledged that on the 120 border crossings between Switzerland and the EU, even with technology some hardware has to be installed, with CCTV cameras, number plate recognition, drone technology and so on. Any such hardware could be very vulnerable to vandalism, so people on the ground would be required to protect it. It is not hard to see how this could quickly be ratcheted up to become a physical border. The chief constable of the PSNI, George Hamilton, has expressed publicly his concerns and warned that border posts and security installations created as a result of a hard Brexit would be seen as fair game for attack by violent dissident republicans.

The second dangerous assumption is that because the Irish have the most to lose economically as a result of Brexit, they will have to sort out the problem and fix it in Brussels. There are even those who say that the inevitable consequence is that Ireland too will have to leave the European Union. But Ireland is a sovereign state and the Irish people overwhelmingly continue to support membership of the European Union. This is particularly true among young people. They did not have a say in the Brexit referendum in 2016, so it is deeply unreasonable to say that it is now down to them to sort it all out.

The third key area of debate is that somehow or other the issue of the border has been exaggerated; some have even used the word “weaponised”. However, just two days before the EU referendum the Prime Minister, Theresa May, said:

“if we were out of the European Union with tariffs on exporting goods into the EU, there would have to be something to recognise that between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. And if you pulled out of the EU and came out of free movement, then how could you have a situation where there was an open border with a country that was in the EU and had access to free movement?”

On this I agree with the Prime Minister.

During an EU Select Committee visit to Ireland and Northern Ireland in January, we heard many people voicing concern about the differences in interpretation in London and in Dublin on the joint agreement reached between the EU and the UK on 8 December. In Dublin there is understandably a firm belief that it was an agreement that was to be honoured by both sides.

The purpose of Amendment 215 is to give effect to paragraphs 49 and 50 of the joint report agreed on 8 December. Paragraph 49 of the joint agreement envisages three different scenarios for finding a solution to the Irish border issue. The second scenario envisages,

“specific solutions to address the unique circumstances of the island of Ireland”.

The noble Lord, Lord Browne, has already read out the details of paragraph 49, so I ask the Minister when the Government intend to come forward with these specific solutions, and why they have not yet come forward with proposals. I am sure the Minister will agree that this is becoming increasingly urgent, given the imminent European Council where these issues will be examined on 23 March.

I shall conclude by saying a few words about some of the unseen consequences of leaving the European Union, and the impact on the Good Friday Belfast agreement. Since we both joined the European Economic Community in 1973, Irish and UK Ministers have had the opportunity to sit around the table in Brussels on a monthly basis. They have sat around that table as equals. These meetings have provided an unseen but vital opportunity to discuss the issues of the day and to work around problems. This has provided a vital information flow which has had a not inconsiderable influence on the peace process. In his concluding remarks, can the Minister say what thought the Government have given to enhancing UK-Ireland relations in the absence of these hugely valuable diplomatic channels? On this, as with so many other issues surrounding Brexit, the full consequences are not yet fully understood, but we must do all we can to avoid any reversal of the hard-won peace and progress achieved over the last 20 years.

[Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment so eloquently spoken to by my noble friend Lord Hain. I remind the House that we are three weeks away from the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. Those two decades ago it was my privilege, as the political development Minister at the time, to chair a good part of those negotiations—but in 1997 I had been appointed by the Prime Minister to be the European Minister as well. There is a link between the two, which is why I wanted to speak to this amendment.

The committee of your Lordships’ House that looked at this matter some months ago concluded that common European Union membership had laid the groundwork for the development of the peace process. Indeed, the preamble to the Good Friday agreement says that the two Governments wished,

“to develop still further the unique relationship between their peoples and the close co-operation between their countries as friendly neighbours and as partners in the European Union”.

There can be no doubt that throughout the whole of that agreement the three strands—strand 1, which dealt with the internal arrangements within Northern Ireland; strand 2, which dealt with the relations between the north and the south of the island of Ireland; and strand 3, which dealt with east-west relations between the two countries of Ireland and the United Kingdom—and all the other elements of the Good Friday agreement were underpinned by that common membership of the European Union.

In strand 1, much of the success of the last 20 years has been based upon the European funding in Northern Ireland, not least of which was the actual peace money itself, which helped to produce peace, stability and prosperity in Northern Ireland. In strand 2, where these bodies north and south come together, much of what they did relied upon the common membership of the European Union, again with regard to funding but other issues as well. Strand 3 set up the British-Irish Council and the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, both of which deal with matters affecting the European Union. In the paragraphs cited by my noble friend Lord Browne a few minutes ago, the Government themselves accept that the Good Friday agreement must be kept intact when Brexit occurs.

Another issue, perhaps not so legal but very important, is the fact that in my view the agreement would not have been successful if the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom had not entered the European Union together in 1973. That meant that time after time, day after day, even hour after hour, in Brussels and elsewhere, the two Governments could talk at ministerial and official level. That talking meant that the old bad relations between the two countries faded away, as, of course, did the border itself. The blurring of the border as a result of the events of the last 20 years has been hugely significant in not just economic and security terms but in psychological terms, because that border has gone in the minds of both nationalists and unionists. Its resurrection would be an absolute disaster. Whatever one’s views on Brexit, the idea of returning to what had been there before would be extremely backward looking.

The other issue to which my noble friend referred was that the Good Friday agreement is an international treaty. The two Governments of Britain and the Republic of Ireland are joint guarantors of the Good Friday agreement. The responsibility rests upon our shoulders to ensure that all the aspects of that agreement, which are as fresh today in my mind as they were 20 years ago, are guaranteed by the two Governments.

Senator George Mitchell, who will come over to Northern Ireland in a couple of weeks’ time to commemorate the Good Friday agreement, said a couple of days ago that there were 700 days of failure and one day of success in the talks which led to the Good Friday agreement. If we do not ensure that we deal with the border and respect all the aspects of the Good Friday agreement, we cannot allow the Brexit negotiations to put at risk the great worth and good that has come to Northern Ireland and, indeed, to Ireland and the United Kingdom, as a consequence of what we did two decades ago.